Hear “Laying Down Rock,” a New Song from White Fence’s Tim Presley and Cate Le Bon

You’ve heard that one about the making of “Hold On, I’m Comin’ ”? The song was a major hit single in 1966 for soul singers Sam and Dave, and written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter at Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee. As the story goes, Hayes was yelling at Porter to hurry up in the bathroom and get back to the studio—just take a moment and imagine Isaac Hayes telling you to get back to it in that well-deep reverberating bass voice of his—and Porter hollered back (you guessed it) “Hold on! I’m comin’!” And lo and behold.

A rented room in current-day downtown Los Angeles is a far cry from mid-sixties Memphis, but so it was for DRINKS, the newly formed duo of Cate Le Bon (yes, that’s a stage name; no blood relation to Duran Duran’s Simon) and Tim Presley (currently of White Fence, formerly of The Nerve Agents, Darker My Love, The Strange Boys, and, for a spell, The Fall), in the writing of “Laying Down Rock,” premiering here today off their forthcoming debut, Hermits On Holiday.

What to call themselves? “Oh, Cate came up with that amazing name,” Presley says drily over the phone from L.A., where the musicians are neighbors in Highland Park. Le Bon, equally deadpan, banters back: “Well, sometimes the band’s name is so cool and the music’s awful. So if we start with an awful name—”

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Single: Laying Down Rock, Illustrated by Tim Presley of DRINKS

DRINKS was many months in the talking, but just a few fast weeks in the actual making. Both Le Bon, a singer-songwriter who performs in both English and her native Welsh, and Presley, a San Francisco hardcore punk turned lo-fi psychedelic musician, are prolific sorts with multiple solo records and recent-ish side projects (Cate: Manic Street Preachers, Kevin Morby; Tim: Ty Segall) under their belts and a lot of shared favorite records. At the top of that list is the Krautrock classic Faust’s IV. “It’s like a bible in a way,” Tim says. “It’s got perfect songs, the sonic quality, the chording, the mix of it, the playfulness, the seriousness. It’s got everything.” For DRINKS, they sought to find similar common ground. “We let go of any formula we may have had in our own separate entities,” he adds. “If it sounded too White Fence or too Cate Le Bon, that wasn’t the point of this group. This is a new band.”

Says Cate: “We’d just play guitar with each other. Either Tim started playing something that I liked very much, that excited me, and I’d tell him that and we’d work it from there, or vice versa. The rule was you weren’t allowed to bring a fully formed song into the studio. We wrote everything as a team.”

Such was the case even in the more offstage “Hold On, I’m Comin’ ”–esque moments, when a studio break of debatable length ended up producing a song in its entirety. “I was playing this riff, and Tim took forever, and I had to keep playing it for like 20 minutes so I didn’t forget it,” says Cate. “And then he walked in the room and just picked up an acoustic guitar and started singing.”

“And that’s it!” Tim says. “I came in, and we hit record, played the song, did the lyrics too. I mean, all I did was wash my hands.”